Holas todos!!!!

Well, I am getting close to my two-month anniversary of being out of the country and doing as well as ever!!

The last few weeks have been a bit of a hectic whirlwind as we found out that our modest little farm would be host to almost 650 kids in a week-and-a-half’s time, which oh-so-conveniently coincides perfectly with the time that my supervisors had to leave to perform some research in another part of the country. The result is that the happiness and education of these 650 kids lay in the hands of three gringos with bad Spanish, two Spanish speakers who have never worked with kids before, one Spanish speaker who can only make it to half of the tours with these kids, and one German who doesn’t speak Spanish, kind of speaks English, and arrived a week ago. This was our armada against 650 children.

But, so far, everything has turned out really well. True, we did have a few setbacks - the German girl and I tried to boil eggs today with a special new Bolivian/German technique I had never heard of, and several of them ended up exploding in the pot, and we also found out at the last minute that the “niños” that we were expecting looked like this:

AKA, they were much older than we thought, between the ages of 13 and 18, and all of our games were geared towards 7-11-year-olds. However, it turns out that these kids really liked to race each other to recycle trash and act out climate change as well, and reacted with the same amount of girly screams (both the boys and the girls) when they found out that the soil that they were touching was actually fully composted cow poo, so it turned out to be really fun. Field trips are much more laid back here than in the U.S….for example, it was the norm to have several people talking at the same time as the tour guide, and it was not unusual for some kids to separate from the group and, instead of participating, do this:

The teacher, the entire time, took an active role in the activities and in controlling the group:

She spent the entire time sitting or chatting with her students, or walking away from the group to find some shade. Here is one more photo of the games on the first day:

To say the least, we were really relieved that the first day went so well, and felt super lucky that the second day went just as smoothly, only with a little more respect from the young’uns towards us, their “profes” for the day.

Unfortunately, the third day, our niños were four years old, which, once again, was a little off the radar screen of what age we were expecting, only in the opposite direction. The result was several devastating activities for the kids, including one in which we tried to teach these four-year-olds what greenhouse gases and climate change are. God forbid that that ever has to happen ever again, anywhere in the world.

But I feel like I am making this sound like a bit more of a disaster than it really has been. Really, everything so far has been really wonderful and really rewarding. The kids have taken to giving us little kisses on the cheek as they leave, thanking us profoundly, and saying really cute things, like “Que bonito tus juegos!!” or, literal translation, “What beautiful games!” that have just really made us happy, and it has been really fun to teach the games that my co-volunteers or I have designed and to have them get really into it (and more so, to be able to make them laugh while speaking in another language for other reasons than you saying something super inappropriate and not realizing it). So, in more or less words, I am going to be really sad when the final two groups of kids come tomorrow.

Well, that’s about it for work. In other news, I climbed my first Bolivian peak this weekend, beautiful snow-capped Tunari, one photo of which I have posted below (and only one...sorry, blogger.com is being silly and annoying again). I would say that this 5030 m peak was quite the difficult climb and a huge accomplishment, but the fact that a 68-year-old man was racing the rest of the group to the top tells a different story.

Also, I’ve officially signed the contract to stay here until April 30^th, and some next steps include convincing my sister to fly down here afterwards for a bit of Bolivian climbing, and convincing my parents to ship mp3 CD-versions of the contents of my external harddrive, as I don’t think that my meager iTunes library of Billy Joel and Styx and old Science Friday podcasts will really cut it for me over the next six months, no matter how much of a stud Ira Flatow is.

Let me know how things are going in your world, wherever you are!! Peace to all and take care!!

Our town

Okay, last blog for at least a day or so (or given my track record, three weeks), I promise.

I took my camera out last Sunday for a little stroll through two of the main plazas, because Sunday is a day here where everyone relaxes outside together and does fun stuff like break dancing and live concerts that obnoxious tourists really like to photograph. So here are my photos of the day, so that you can all get to know my city a little better.

Also, I have a few videos I will try to post soon, a couple of some crazy break dancer guys in the plaza, and another one of a very high quality praise-Jesus band, so those will be on here for your viewing pleasure as soon as I can fit them all onto my tiny little flash drive.

The first photo is the statue right next to my stadium (the stadium has everything by the way, from a futbol field and a track to karate classes, weight machines, and a "climbing gym," aka a couple of rocks cemented onto the stadium wall, whose routes are extremely slippery and difficult thanks to a local cell phone company deciding to paint a large advertisement over the area, but they are really fun routes nonetheless; I am lucky enough to have all of this half a block away from my house!). I am still trying to figure out why this Grecian Olympian is deified in my city; as far as I know, our humble stadium has never played host to any Olympics, yet alone to one that involved nearly-nude young males that are unnaturally covered in muscles.

The second photo is a lovely view from the bridge closest to my home that leads to the downtown area…the gigantic Jesus Christ statue, known as El Cristo here, is the tallest in the world, beating Rio de Janiero’s Jesus by one meter…I wonder who built theirs last? Even better than an over-sized homage to the Catholic religion, this lovely billboard greets me every time I want to go downtown.

The third is a view of The Prado, one of the main streets that lead downtown. Pretty, no? Cochabambinos really know how to care about their city (I left out the pictures of all the trash strewn in the garden nearby, but I will show those tragic photos when I ask for donations from you, no worries J).

I had another really pretty photo of one of the many churches of Cochabamba, but I really wanted to show a bit of the plaza life instead (Blogspot limits me to five photos a post, which explains the outrageous number of blog posts today), so the next two photos are pretty typical of the main plazas around Cochabamba. The first one is a live demo of some spray painting artwork going on…this guy had a crowd of around 30 people watching him, and was raffling off the paintings at the end of it. Another 30 people or so had gathered around the "artwork" in my last photo…political dialogue is extremely popular here, and it is not uncommon to see several pieces like this, usually complemented by billboards of information and a large crowd of debaters. One of the many reasons why I love this city so much! Everyone really cares about what is going on in their country and enjoys discussing their views with people who disagree.

Picture all this going on, with the live music of a homeless man playing quena (a wooden flute) or of some Cholas playing guitar and quena and dancing (and later, that lovely Jesus band), along with a couple young groups of chicos break dancing on the lawn, many families relaxing on the benches, and young kids driving around the plaza in mini electric toy cars - one of the local attractions here and the cause for the sound of laughter coming from the plaza for hours - and you have Cochabamba. I know a lot of you have heard about the violence and the anger here, so this is my side of the town.

Peace my cariños and cariñas! I hope all is well!

Gaia Pacha, my work

Well hello again! I thought that I would make up for my lack of blogs with a barrage of them, so that everyone has a play-by-play of what I have been up to.

I wanted to describe a bit about what I have been doing here as a volunteer in Cochabamba, so that you all don’t think that I am just wandering around koala-less eucalyptus forests (which should never exist, in my opinion…there should have been koalas crawling around like crazy at Pairumani) and climbing aboard the sketchy Dentist-on-a-Bus (which I have seen roaming the city twice more now, looking for innocent, unsuspecting patients).

I work for a foundation called Gaia Pacha (www.gaiapacha.org – as I write this blog, I do not have Internet on my computer, and cannot remember if it is in Spanish or English, so I apologize to all you English-only speakers if it isn’t all that informative) whose focus is on environmental education and community awareness. Gaia Pacha was funded three or so years ago by a group of university students, all in their mid-20s and 30s. One of their projects consists of traveling around all of Bolivia to interview farmers about the impacts of climate change on their crops, which they will turn into both a documentary and a book (right now, only hard data exists about climate change in Bolivia, and Gaia Pachans are hoping to create a socio-economic view of it as well). Another is to travel to a large quinoa cultivation area in Potosí, one of the cities here, and do scientific research on the differences between organic and conventional farming there, to see if one is better than the other, and then to create educational materials based on the research.

A third project of theirs is one that I am helping to develop, and consists of turning a little farm in Cochabamba into an educational facility for elementary-school-aged children here, and hopefully eventually for people of all ages. A couple of Gaia Pachans and volunteers here have already helped to turn this eco-farm, called CPIA, or Center for Environmental Protection (today my supervisor also called it EcoTeca, which honestly I have no idea what he was talking about or why it is called that, but I think that might be the official name now), into the beginnings of an environmental education center. We were lucky enough to have this space donated to us by a refuge center here, called Aldeas Infantilies SOS, and it already consists of an eco-friendly building made of local mud, straw, and plastic bags and designed to capture the most heat possible, several compost heaps, composting dry toilets with a mechanism (aka extra bucket inside the toilet) to capture the liquid waste to water plants on the farm, a water tank to capture shower and kitchen water that also waters these plants, a biodigestor that turns cow waste into methane gas that serves as all the cooking fuel needed for the farm, and more compost (that eventually grows the alfalfa that feeds the cows again – one big cycle, ooo! Please geek out with me on this). We also have a food dehydrator, a local traditional medicine and herb garden, several greenhouses, a guinea pig farm (don’t ask), and now, to our happiness, a room for the kids to learn all about what it means to be environmentally-friendly.

I put a few pictures up of my "office" so you all can know what a difficult life I live here. The first photo is an over-all view and includes our little EcoTeca (whatever that means) house, and the next few photos are what we have developed on the inside so far for the young’uns. For those of you who want to see what this amazing biodigestor looks like (aka Cara and all other cool people), I also put up photos of that. I will be posting another blog soon on all of this, with a little more detail of the educational material we are developing because, to be perfectly honest, we need a lot of money to make this little farm educationally successful, and, more importantly, a sustainable project that will be able to last for years to come (or at least until global warming destroys our planet). So keep your eyes out for a new, shameless, Gaia-Pacha-promoting blog that comes complete with a handy little donation button, and you will know what to do. J

For any of you who know anything about me have probably already guessed that I am crazy about this place. I feel so lucky to be involved with the only farm like this in Cochabamba, and so lucky to be involved with turning it into an educational center for kids! It is like the two things that I am crazy about in life, Camp Sparky and sustainability, have collided into one big happy ball o’ fun in Cochabamba. Plus, the people I work with are silly and great. So this is what I will be doing for the next several months.

On that note, I hope you are all doing well and enjoying yourselves wherever you are! Take care!

What?! Sarah actually posts new stuff after awhile?!

Hi friends and family!


OK, so I’ll be the first to admit that I suck at updating my blog. That said, I am going to try to give a quick update through photos of what my city and life has been like for the last three weeks in Bolivia, because I have finally become the brave gringa and have taken my camera out of the safety of my room. By the way, my FSD supervisors have another phrase for "brave gringa," and although it is in Spanish, it translates to something along the lines of "silly gringa that adopts a false sense of security and ends up getting robbed." They say that this usually happens around three weeks into the program. Whoops.


Annnnyways, my life here. I will start with my family, who I have already described – I finally have a photo of them, which is the topmost one here. This is me, my mama here, Ginez, my aunt, Charo, and my little sister (Ginez’s daughter), Fabiola. We are missing Boria, the 24-year-old niece, in this photo – she had a little too much fun the night before this photo and decided to stay home.


This photo is in Pairumani, one of the rich tin baron’s estates, and the next two photos are also from this area. Basically, earlier in Bolivia’s history there were three barons that took over all of the tin mining resources of Bolivia, resulting in extreme poverty for miners and extreme wealth for these three barons, their families, and whatever country they decided to send their money to (England, Argentina, and Spain I believe? I can tell you that whatever they were, Bolivia was not one of them). This is the ugly part of Bolivian history – all of its resources have been sold away (and some of its land – one Bolivian president sold a large chunk of Bolivian’s land that was rich in natural resources for a beautiful, beautiful white stallion, which was well worth it, I’m sure) and have resulted in the majority of Bolivians suffering economically. The beautiful part of it is that this tin baron’s estate is now Pairumani, a lovely ecological park full of eucalyptus trees (unfortunately, the koalas are down in Santa Cruz and in Peru, not here in Cochabamba) and a canyon. In the photo of the canyon, you can see the wonderful Cochabamba in the background.


The gigantic metal man is one of the many pieces of artwork throughout Cochabamba. Despite being such a poor country, I have to say that Cochabambinos have really taken good care of their city (minus many of the flaws in their understanding of environmentalism, which will be in a blog to come). We were lucky enough to have a Prefect (aka Governor of one of Bolivia’s states, called Departments here) here for several years, named Manfred Reyes Villa, who decided that public works projects should be of top priority instead of causing national governmental upsets. The result was an astonishing amount of beautiful parks, a bicycle path that runs through the entire city similar to Boise’s greenbelt (and Arizona’s…oh, no, we don’t have one of those), a soccer field for nearly every corner, and public artwork all over the place. This is just one example – there were pieces that I liked much better, but my photography skills aren’t that great on this bumpy public bus ride, and this was the best I could come up with. (I might add, unfortunately, that this same mayor, Manfred, suddenly turned on his Department and decided to vote for Cochabamba Department’s autonomy after 63% of Cochabambinos voted against it, resulting in an extremely violent riot, the burning of the Prefecture’s door, two people dead, over a hundred injured, and, needless to say, the end of Manfred’s term shortly thereafter. This all occurred in January of 2007 and was very disastrous for Cochabamba and its people. As for Manfred - whoops, I guess causing national governmental upsets WAS on the agenda.)


Finally, I end my blog with a photo of one of the many legitimate businesses here, a Dentist-on-a-Bus, complete with pictures in every window of what your teeth may be feeling like at this moment. Enjoy.


Ciao and I hope all is well!